Night Train to Rigel

“I don’t think so,” she said. “The polyps can detect and interpret vibrations, but only under water.”

“What about Applegate?”

“But you said he was dead,” Losutu protested.

“Director, please,” I said, trying hard to hold on to my temper.

“He might,” Bayta conceded. “The—I mean—the neural degeneration hasn’t yet started—”

“Out in the hall with him,” McMicking said briskly, grabbing Applegate under the armpits. “Better kick that coral thing out there, too, just to be on the safe side.”

A minute later we had dumped both the body and the coral out in the corridor, making sure to retrieve the data chips first. “What about you?” I asked Bayta when we were back in the compartment. “Did he get you with the coral?”

“No,” she said, rubbing gingerly at her cheek.

“You sure? No—hold still,” I ordered as I took hold of her chin and tilted her head up toward the light. “Let me see.”

“See what?” she retorted, pushing my hand away. “A microscopic scratch? I tell you, he didn’t touch me.”

“Okay, okay,” I growled. “I was just trying to help.”

“Help by figuring out what he’s going to do next,” she growled back. Dropping back down onto the bed, she pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged her arms tightly around them as she stared off into a corner.

“What do you mean, what he’s going to do?” Losutu asked, his expression unreadable. “He’s dead, right?”

“She means he, the Modhri, the group mind,” I told him. “Weren’t you listening?”

“Yes, but…” He trailed off. “You were serious, weren’t you? But that’s…”

“Insane?” I suggested tartly. “Ridiculous? Horrifying? Pick an adjective and move on, because it’s also true.”

Losutu took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “All right,” he said. “Assume for the moment it’s true. As she says: What now? What exactly are his options?”

“You saw all the first-class passengers moving like zombies while we were coming here,” I reminded him. “All of them are Modhran walkers, just like Applegate was, all of them apparently being directly controlled by the group mind.” I patted my pocket. “And their sole purpose in life is to get these data chips back.”

“How many of them are there?” McMicking asked.

“At least everyone in first class, plus JhanKla and his entourage, plus probably a few others scattered around for insurance,” I told him. “The odds here are not good.”

“Yeah, but it’s only another hour to Homshil,” McMicking pointed out. “Maybe we can barricade ourselves in until we get there.”

“And then fight our way through them to get off?” I asked doubtfully. “Worth a try. Let’s see if we can get these beds off the walls—”

And from behind me, Bayta screamed.

“What?” I snapped, spinning around to face her.

Her eyes were staring into infinity, her face gone deathly white, her chest heaving with short, rapid breaths. “Bayta?” I asked, dropping down on the bed beside her and taking her hand. It was icy cold. “Bayta, what is it?”

“They killed him,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “They killed one of the Spiders.”

“Who did?” I asked, a creepy feeling running up my back.

“The crowd,” she whispered. “The mob. All of them.”

“That can’t be,” McMicking objected. “You said it was just first class. There can’t be enough of them to take out a Spider.”

“He was wrong,” she murmured, her eyes still blank. “They’re all part of the Modhri now. They’re attacking the Spiders, and they’re going to kill them all.”

She closed her eyes. “And then they’re going to kill us.”

TWENTY-ONE:

For perhaps half a minute no one spoke. I looked at Bayta, then McMicking, then Losutu, seeing my own disbelief reflected in their faces. For centuries the Spiders had been the most stable and unchanging part of the galactic landscape: enigmatic and anonymous, striding silently through the background of interstellar events even as they enabled those events to happen. They had no faces or personalities; no apparent desires other than to serve; no hopes or dreams or joys or sorrows of their own.

And there had never, ever been any indication that they, like all the rest of us, might be mortal.

“What do we do?” Losutu asked at last. “We can’t hold off a whole train full of people until we reach Homshil, can we?”

“It doesn’t matter if we can or not,” Bayta said. The horror had faded from her face, leaving only a bitter resignation behind. “The Spiders are the ones who control the Quadrail.”

“You mean they’ve gotten to the engine?” McMicking asked.

Bayta shook her head. “There isn’t anyone in the engine,” she said. “They control it from back here. Once they’re all dead, we’ll just keep going until we run out of fuel. Or until we hit something.

“At a hundred kilometers an hour,” Losutu murmured.

“Or a light-year per minute, depending on how you look at it,” I said grimly “But this doesn’t make sense. You told me it takes days or weeks for a colony to form inside someone.”

“That’s if you start with a single polyp hook from a single pinprick,” she said with a sigh. “If you put full-grown polyps in to begin with, and a lot of them—” She swallowed. “You could create a new walker within hours. Maybe even minutes.”

So that was what Applegate had been threatening her with. A slash across the cheek with the coral would dump dozens of the damn polyps straight into her bloodstream. “Zero to Modhri in fifteen seconds,” I said. “I guess that explains where everyone in first class was going. Back to the Peerage car for a lump of coral, then off to the first annual Modhran recruitment drive.”

“Stop babbling, Compton,” Losutu bit out. “What I want to know is, how does this gain them anything? Now they’ll all die.”

“Unless he doesn’t realize he’s killing the drivers?” McMicking suggested.

A spasm of pain flashed across Bayta’s face. “He’s killed another one,” she murmured.

“No, he understands, all right,” I said. “Remember, the Modhri is a group mind, with each colony forming connections with any others nearby. That’s what’s happened here: The colonies in Applegate and JhanKla and the first-class passengers were linked up with the coral back in the Peerage car. Now the mind segment’s apparently been extended to the rest of the passengers as well.”

“So they’ll still all die,” Losutu protested.

“He doesn’t care if this mind segment dies,” I told him. “All he cares about is making the segment big enough that he’ll be able to link to whatever mind segment is waiting in the Homshil Station when we go roaring through.”

“Where he can pass on the information,” McMicking said, nodding. “Sure.”

“What information?” Losutu asked. “What’s so important?”

“The fact that we have their stolen data chips,” I said. “Up to now, the Modhri didn’t know whether we had them, or Fayr had them, or whether we’d passed them off to someone else.”

“But if the train crashes, he’ll never get the chips back.”

“He doesn’t need them back,” I said. “He just needs to make sure no one else has them.”

“And this is worth sacrificing JhanKla and Applegate and all the rest of them for?” Losutu persisted.

“To the Modhri, the individuals don’t matter as long as the whole remains,” I said. “Would you worry about sacrificing a few brain cells?”

Losutu hissed between his teeth. “This can’t be happening,” he muttered.